


Nothing Beside Remains

by take_liberties



Category: Breaking Bad
Genre: Angst, Gen, Grief, Offscreen Canonical Character Death, Sister-Sister Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-22
Updated: 2013-12-22
Packaged: 2018-01-05 13:37:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,503
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1094487
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/take_liberties/pseuds/take_liberties
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Marie grieves Hank. Set roughly around the time of Granite State.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Nothing Beside Remains

**Author's Note:**

  * For [warriorpoet](https://archiveofourown.org/users/warriorpoet/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide, warriorpoet!
> 
> Thanks to L for the always priceless beta help and moral support.

By the time they removed the yellow tape from her house and let her back in, the funeral had come and gone. Marie had left him behind, tried to breathe through the finality of the dirt filling in the grave, sealing him permanently in that box. After she left, she went back to a motel room where a strange man with a loaded gun stood outside her door as though anything like that could actually protect her. 

Once she was allowed to go back into their home, her home, she started to get the strangest feelings. Her grief was an extended exercise in cognitive dissonance. She understood that Hank was dead, and she understood that her life was carrying on and moving forward, but it seemed impossible to reconcile these two facts. She had no frame of reference with which to comprehend that they could both be truths. 

It became common for her to almost forget he wasn’t there. To move around the kitchen, pulling a casserole out of the freezer that some neighbor had brought to her after the wake, and begin to call out to the living room to ask if he wanted some of it. She always caught herself in time, but sometimes it was all she could do not to put the casserole dish down on the kitchen floor, right where she stood, and crumple into a heap beside it until she had any energy to move again. 

The most mundane things were the worst - pulling into the driveway and realizing that the house she was about to walk into was empty, and would remain so. Rolling over in the middle of the night at the edge of wakefulness, and understanding that the cool sheets and the smooth mattress next to her didn’t mean Hank was out on a stakeout or in the bathroom, he was just gone. She kept a perimeter around his spaces in the house, stayed out of his office because if she kept the door shut she could almost effortlessly believe that he was in there, working. She could keep up this facade for stretches of time, but it always ended eventually. 

One day she found herself standing with a palm resting flat against the door to his office, eyes closed. She wrapped her other hand around the doorknob and pictured him vividly. He was sitting at his desk inside, irritated that she was disturbing him, exaggeratedly flipping closed a manila folder stuffed with pictures and diagrams. He normally wasn’t that concerned about confidential case information around Marie, but sometimes it gave him ammunition when she was annoying him, and he’d use it against her then. She could see him closing the folder, rearranging papers, looking up at her expectantly, but that was where it ended. He never said anything.

She didn’t open the door.

**

Hank’s death created a static pocket in the center of Marie’s life. Even as change swept over her, charged through the rest of her family, he was now a constant and invariable factor who would neither affect nor be affected by any of it. There had been few constants like this in her life, her youth had mostly been defined by an ever-shifting landscape of change and disappointment, until she had found Hank to steady her. The permanence of this new world was not one for which she could ever have prepared. She gave in one day and called Skyler. 

Once, in grade school, Skyler had gotten angry and kicked Marie out of one of her slumber parties. She’d called her a stupid little kid and told her she wasn’t allowed to talk to any of Skyler’s older, cooler friends. The girls barely acknowledged each other for nearly a week after that, but when Marie fell off a slide at recess, Skyler had marched her way across the playground and refused to leave her sister’s side even when the ambulance arrived to splint Marie’s leg and take her to the emergency room. 

“Truce,” Marie had said then, willing to forget about the slumber party drama entirely. A truce didn’t carry the same weight of absolution these days that it had then, but it was still the thing they promised when they needed each other. It was the thing she promised now to the generic outgoing phone message, waiting for Skyler to accept and answer.

“Marie.” Skyler’s voice was tired, like it always was now.

“Do you remember the last time we saw dad?” Marie asks.

***

Two years and a lifetime ago, they’d stuck a few days worth of provisions in Skyler’s Jeep and headed out to the address he’d given them in northern Nevada. It led them to a rundown motel where it seemed he’d been holed up for a while.

They had sat tensely across from him in a roadside diner while he told them stories about the adventures he’d had recently. He casually mentioned returning from a few months surfing and selling wood carvings in the Virgin Islands and the girls didn’t even say anything about how obvious it was that his pale skin hadn’t seen sunshine in an era.

“Nice tennis bracelet,” he had nodded at the diamond studded loop around Marie’s wrist. “I guess the DEA trade is going well these days.” Skyler hadn’t picked up on anything, not back then. But for Marie it was a blatant acknowledgement. That comment, it turned out, was the only honest moment she ever had with her father about the things they shared, the things they both thought Skyler would never understand.

The moment was brief, and soon shattered by her father turning his attention to his other, older, better daughter, and asking after his son-in-law and his only grandson.

***

“He said- do you remember - he told you specifically you’d married a good man?” Marie knew this conversation couldn’t be easy for either of them, and probably wouldn’t end well. But she needed to have it, and they needed to have it together. 

“He was wrong,” the note in Skyler’s voice wasn’t exactly one of finality, but it wasn’t insincere either. 

“Well, that much is obvious. The whole country knows that by now,” Marie practically spluttered back. She couldn’t really blame Skyler for being self-absorbed, but she didn’thave the energy to let Skyler think this conversation was going to be about her or about the man who murdered her husband.

“What do you want?” Skyler asked. Their truces had been brief and to specific points. Marie calling seemingly to reminisce broke the rules, and the part of their relationship that they can still access this way is under strain as it is.

“He didn’t say - he never said anything about Hank.” Marie knew that expecting what she needed from Skyler at that point was a stretch, but they were on the phone already, and she had to say it.

“You know, Marie.” Skyler’s voice instantly softened. “You know what kind of man he was, and you don’t need dad’s blessing to know it. Dad didn’t know the first thing.” When Hank had been injured, Skyler had spent a lot of time contemplating what it would have been like to help her sister through the grief of his actual death. She couldn’t have predicted any of the things that she ended up saying and doing once the time actually came. 

“But he-”

“Like I said, he was wrong.” Skyler interrupted. This time, she was firm, and they both knew she meant so much more. 

Marie only had time get out a nearly unintelligible “thank you” before breaking into sobs and shoving the phone back into its receiver. She stood like that for a while, hand on the phone, other hand covering her face and letting the sobs wrack her body in a way they hadn’t since the day of the funeral. 

Once she could move again, she walked into the bedroom, through the bathroom, and into the closet. Digging under some scarves in a shelf, she pulled out a little jewelry box that was buried in a place Hank would never have looked. She flipped it open and began combing her fingers through the contents, silver chains and diamond studs, real pearls he could never have afforded to give to her. She found what she was looking for, a tennis bracelet, simple enough for the twelve carats of diamonds on it. She pulled it out and looked at it in her palm for a second before fisting her hand around it. 

Marie walked back out of the closet, the bathroom, the bedroom, down the long hall to the front door. She opened the door and walked past the man standing outside it and down the driveway, ignoring him calling “Ma’am?” behind her. She stopped at the curb, opened her hand, and let the bracelet fall into the storm drain there. And for the first time in as long as she could remember, she let out the deep breath she’d been holding and let the corners of her mouth flicker upward.


End file.
